Una An erect tongue. The Sadean reverberations of Alejandra Pizarnik

Abstract

We intend to read the reverberations of the sadean images in the multiple writings of Alejandra Pizarnik: in her correspondence, diaries, prose texts and poems. This means redefining the sadean as a mode of imagination —and, therefore, of thought— that is not limited to the "sadistic" as a sexual practice, nor as the work of the Marquis de Sade, but rather is presented as a unique configuration of the sensible that crosses times and cultures. We are interested in pointing out how the relationship between Alejandra Pizarnik and the Marquis de Sade was read by critics, based only on a set of short texts in prose. Unlike these controversies, we maintain that sadean images reverberate throughout Pizarnik's writing, tracing moments of variable intensity and questioning the idea of a linear temporality that would officiate as a passage from one writing to another. The Pizarnikian aspect of sadean images reverberates, sometimes simultaneously, in a superposition with masochism, in a feminine and lesbian monstrosity that unleashes a bodily monster language that barely appears in her poems.